Resto Druids/Priests should find them more desirable in 2.4. However, I'm just surprised they aren't BoP.

So nice that they updated the sunwell craftable bind on pickup pieces to require the professions to keep. I sure as hell wasn't looking forward to creating the tailoring robe, then ditch it for the jewelcrafting neck, then ditch that for leatherworking. Glad to see they realized how that was stupid and the wrong direction to take professions.

I don't think this is uniform. Holy 31 pointers were legendary for uselessness for Priests, as was Survival 31! (Come on! You know you want Holy Nova and Lacerate!). On the same token, back in the day the "top" (earlier tiers) of Holy was amazing: when the talent reorganization came, they "moved" the top down to the bottom to "fix" the tree.

I think the issues with Discipline are more rooted in the philosophy and direction of the tree. Discipline was suppose to be the "staying-power" tree and Holy the "thoroughput" tree. The flaw with this design is that increasing throughput also increased efficiency, efficiency leads to stayingpower. Discipline did not increase thoroughput, it just marginally increased staying power. Holy did both roles and was not marginal.

But really, this entire discussion is niether here nor there. 2.4 isn't really about Druid, Priest, Warlock or whatever talents. We all know Talents aren't likely to change until WotlK.


On the topic of Elixir of Mastery and Alchemy... Elixir of Mastery were/are arguably one of the most expensive Elixirs to make. On my server it -is- the most expensive elixir. It's bad enough that Terocone sells for as much if not more than Nightmare Vine and Netherbloom, but its a sucker-punch when you need three Terocones. I an Alchemist/Herbalist and I'd like to welcome this change =p I'd rather put Terocones towards Draenic Wisdom anymore.

That comment is particularly annoying if you compare it to a truly bloated tree like Paladin Protection, where it's possible to end up with 50+pts in protection while still having to skip high value talents and without any hybridization for healing at all.

Have to agree, the most bloated tree in game imo is paladin protection tree. Spend 61 points and still have to skip very very good talents for tanking. Blizzard just seems to have added and added and added. I'm scared of what they'll do in WotLK.

One of my concerns with 2.4 is that a change that went live with patch 2.2 for Tempest Keep: The Eye and Serpentshrine Cavern doesn't seem (to my knowledge) to have been implented in 2.4 for Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, namely this change:
With the tier token drops being upped from 2 to 3 and with more gear being available around the Black Temple/Mount Hyjal ItemLevel range in 2.4 I can only presume it is to make sure that more people get to push through that content at a faster rate so that they can hopefully experience the Sunwell before the next expansion is out, this is all well and right in my opinion but I think that possibly Blizzard might have overlooked not implenting the change I've quoted above for BT/Hyjal.

The problem being that if people are to go through the pre-Sunwell content at a faster rate they are not expected to sit around and farm Hyjal/BT for as long as all the other guilds who are about to start Sunwell once 2.4 is out have done, I think this may lead to a problem that people who may recently have killed Archimonde/Illidan end up sitting around farming BT/Hyjal for too long before they can advance in the Sunwell simply due to a lack of gear.

But then again I'm not sure how tough the gear requirement for the Sunwell is, can anyone with some knowledge comment on this?

I also do realize that people may expect for badge gear to perhaps fill some item slots that you would otherwise do with BT/Hyjal gear but from what I have seen a lot of the badge gear is relativly "meh" and badly itemized.


On another note.. do marks of the illidari drop in the sunwell along with the epic gems?

I've thought of the same idea, but it would mean a shift in Blizzard's way of doing things, from "loot is random" to "loot is random.. half the time". It might seem like a small thing but I have the feeling that Blizzard might see it as something more, it does ruin the suprise a fair deal and it would also mean that people would alternate raid configs to a greater extent.

World of Raids is saying it for SSO, but has anyone checked Hyjal's vendor? The 4 new epic patterns are available off of him, at honored, according to wowhead, but the price hasn't updated.

But they were completely fine in doing exactly that in AQ40, or not? 1[Qiraji Bindings of Command]/ [Qiraji Bindings of Dominance] each per Huhuran kill for example.

Especially considering the "hardest" part is getting your non-tier pieces anyway because with 3 token drops you have a much better chance at getting those compared to, say, Skull of Guldan, I don't see this as such a big problem.

AQ40 was a long time ago and quite the experimental dungeon at the time, things might not have been working out as Blizzard planned or hoped, and even so.. things obviously change over time and especially so Blizzard's way of distributing loot.

But as said, I personally have no issue with it but I think Blizzard feels another way since the obvious change with having 3 tokens is that you can have one of each on every kill, I am sure that idea must have sprung into Blizzard's head.

Is it just me, or is the physical DPS mail almost entirely missing from the Sunwell loot tables? The major sites (WoR, MMO) seem to think they have quite a large portion of the gear datamined so far, and I see only 2 pieces of non-crafted mail showing up in wowhead. Are we still missing a big enough portion of the loot tables to assume there are a bunch more pieces out there?

This has been bothering me for a while, when everything started getting datamined weeks ago I just assumed Blizzard hadn't added the Enh/Hunter loot yet. But now its been a few weeks and a lot of PTR updates and it still isn't there.

The loottables look incomplete, indeed. I haven't seen any slow 1h weapon for either rogues (except dagger of course), enhancement shamans or warriors yet. The only thing we get are two offhand fists.

I hope the loottables are incomplete, the dearth of slow 2 handed weapons (or even a 2-hander that isn't itemized for a hunter) makes me a very sad ret paladin.

Just to clarify, all ret gear from 60-70 had its spell damage converted to STR on the first or second PTR push over a month ago. They basically ran a script that did it to all items. I think someone even calculated the conversion ratio and posted it in this thread.

This is a common misconception, that I don't understand why people aren't.. understanding. When the PTR was released, much of the loot tables were datamined via the Sunmote Gear Exchange vendor. Of course, this vendor has no Mail DPS gear, because there's nothing to trade in for it. So, I'm sure there will be more mail DPS gear, just spread across the bosses. It looks to me like they want every class/spec to get five off-drop pieces of armor in Sunwell.

Apolyon is perfect if you have Seal of Blood, though. =/


Keep up hope that they realize just how stupid it is to have a 200+ dps difference in a single spec based entirely on a factional difference, particularly since they've itemized sunwell t6 in a manner that works only for Seal of Blood users.

They've fixed most other factional imbalances so this is probably the biggest one remaining.

It would be nice if loot overall somewhat balanced related to demand. It seems every tier has to many items of one slot (shoulders in T5), and to few of another (weapons overall).

In the absence of that, one of each token seems the most logical decision.

It also lets them make the items more powerful. I'd bet this is the main driver behind the requirement.

Think of it like the whole elixir/flask situation. You can only have one flask or two elixirs up, and because of this, they're free to make the individual elixirs more potent than they'd be otherwise, while maintaining the same balance level.

If they know that no character will ever have these items for more than two professions at a time, they can make all of these items more powerful and interesting than they could otherwise.

Well they just changed the range on cyclone from 30 to 20 yards. Not unexpected, but painful for druids anyway.

Perfect for Seal of Blood would still be STR instead of 2xAP. I've really wondered about this--do they make these end-game weapons (Apolyon = Ashkandi 3.0, Twinblade of the Phoenix = Ashkandi 2.0) both faster than they should be *and* with 'Hunter Stats' on purpose? Only Dark Edge of Insanity and Might of Menethil stand out to me as being very well-designed end-boss 2h'ers for an Arms Warrior or Retribution Paladin. Sure, I love my Cataclysm's Edge, but I would love it more if it was 3.8 delay (though at least it has STR instead of AP).

2.4 PTR and Patch Notes

2 pages late. There is discussion about this change (and druid hybridity in general) in many of the following posts.